Last couple of days...
College
So on Thursday I was feeling well enough to get back into my routine. Being Thursday meant I was at college, rather than in the office. The day was good, save for the fact our thesis groups have been changed. This is the last of four years and we have to do a thesis project, which ends with a big presentation at the end of the year.
The class of eight was split by the course leader, into two groups of four and I was happy with the group arrangement I was in. Sadly this week the lecturers decided to change the groups again and to be honest, I'm not overly impressed. I was originally happy because I was in a group with Brad, an old friend of my sister, who works in the same field as me. There's gonna be a lot of design and regulations drawing work in this project and the two of us would have been able to share that out easily. He understands the processes and we get on well.
Alas, he's been moved into the other group. I'm now worried about being considered the group smart-arse, in the bad sense, if I don't keep my patience in check. Already I'm having to try and justify the way I know the system works - I've been a part of that system for over four years - I'm by no means infallible but I do have a reasonably good idea of what I'm doing. I shouldn't need to explain over and over again, why it would be a waste of time designing an old people's home with a profile form aluminium type roofing system in a conservation area surrounded by listed buildings. Urgh. We'll see how it goes. I need to come up with three designs for next Thursday, which I'll be working on over the course of this weekend.
Work
Whilst I didn't return to work proper until Friday, I had popped in during my lunch break on Thursday to make some prints of recent designs I'd drawn for a couple of nursing homes. Thought it would be a good idea to show the sort of thing we'd need to produce for our thesis project.
So I guess the question is, in my absence, did this computer firm get the office broadband router set up? Answer: Yes. Those who know me well won't be surprised to learn there's an almighty BUT headed this way. Let me start with a diagram...
...this shows how the LAN was setup by myself in January 2001. The HUB was centrally located and each device had a fixed IP of 192.168.0.X, where X was 1-6, where 6 is the laptop - omitted here because it's rarely often plugged into the LAN. It should be noted how I'd taken the trouble to fix the cables to run along the top of the skirting boards, so you barely noticed it, if at all.
When we decided to go down the broadband router route, I suggested the following...
...simply to uplink the router to our existing HUB using one of the existing cables. You'd then only need to buy a short piece of cable to connect the nearest computer into the new router. Simple as pie and in my opinion, the simplest way of getting the office LAN online. Very little configuration required on the computers.
But nooooo...the guys who came around are contracted computer experts who need to ensure everything takes as long as possible. They need to look as though they're doing something big and complicated. Here's what they did...
...which has me stunned. All the existing cabling has been ripped out and I can only assume they've taken that away for themselves. Our old HUB is now defunct. The new broadband router has been positioned where I would have put it but these cowboys have run huge new lengths of cable around the office, which is just laying loose on the floor and looks a real mess. The router is designed to cater for more computers than the office will ever have, so has cost more than necessary.
Obviously not wanting to disappoint me, they made even more of a joke of themselves when it came to the computers themselves. All they did was to open up the LAN connection TCP/IP protocol settings dialogue and ticked the "obtain addresses automatically" button. And I mean, that's all they did. None of the computers where patched up to have all the latest security updates, despite the router having a hardware firewall, no consideration was put into perhaps checking the software firewalls were set up, hell, even turned on. Better safe than sorry?
Having let the computers randomly assign themselves IP addresses and work out for themselves what other settings to use has lead to trouble already. We have a photocopier that has a network scanning and printing card installed. This has to use a fixed IP address. Surprise surprise, one of the computers decided to assign itself the same IP as this device and knocked it off the LAN. Clever.
Oh and they didn't reconfigure the SMTP addresses in our email software so we could send mail out on the new connection.
Where does this leave me?
I'm amazed a group of monkeys got this far. I mean hey, it works but they're far from finishing the job. The office now contracts these guys to deal with our computer maintenance so really, I shouldn't be doing anything about the mess they made of what should have been a quick, simple, no fuss job. Obviously nothing changed as far as the office is concerned. I was up and down like a jack-in-the-box, at one point eight times in half an hour, to answer silly little questions. I had to reconfigure the SMTP addresses myself because it wasn't long before people started complaining that emails weren't being sent. It's by no means difficult, just that our new contracted computer 'experts' should have done this. In any case, shouldn't the office be calling them up for all their little questions?
Should I be upset that after over ten years, I've been replaced by a bunch of paid monkeys that aren't any good at their jobs? Madness...
So on Thursday I was feeling well enough to get back into my routine. Being Thursday meant I was at college, rather than in the office. The day was good, save for the fact our thesis groups have been changed. This is the last of four years and we have to do a thesis project, which ends with a big presentation at the end of the year.
The class of eight was split by the course leader, into two groups of four and I was happy with the group arrangement I was in. Sadly this week the lecturers decided to change the groups again and to be honest, I'm not overly impressed. I was originally happy because I was in a group with Brad, an old friend of my sister, who works in the same field as me. There's gonna be a lot of design and regulations drawing work in this project and the two of us would have been able to share that out easily. He understands the processes and we get on well.
Alas, he's been moved into the other group. I'm now worried about being considered the group smart-arse, in the bad sense, if I don't keep my patience in check. Already I'm having to try and justify the way I know the system works - I've been a part of that system for over four years - I'm by no means infallible but I do have a reasonably good idea of what I'm doing. I shouldn't need to explain over and over again, why it would be a waste of time designing an old people's home with a profile form aluminium type roofing system in a conservation area surrounded by listed buildings. Urgh. We'll see how it goes. I need to come up with three designs for next Thursday, which I'll be working on over the course of this weekend.
Work
Whilst I didn't return to work proper until Friday, I had popped in during my lunch break on Thursday to make some prints of recent designs I'd drawn for a couple of nursing homes. Thought it would be a good idea to show the sort of thing we'd need to produce for our thesis project.
So I guess the question is, in my absence, did this computer firm get the office broadband router set up? Answer: Yes. Those who know me well won't be surprised to learn there's an almighty BUT headed this way. Let me start with a diagram...
...this shows how the LAN was setup by myself in January 2001. The HUB was centrally located and each device had a fixed IP of 192.168.0.X, where X was 1-6, where 6 is the laptop - omitted here because it's rarely often plugged into the LAN. It should be noted how I'd taken the trouble to fix the cables to run along the top of the skirting boards, so you barely noticed it, if at all.
When we decided to go down the broadband router route, I suggested the following...
...simply to uplink the router to our existing HUB using one of the existing cables. You'd then only need to buy a short piece of cable to connect the nearest computer into the new router. Simple as pie and in my opinion, the simplest way of getting the office LAN online. Very little configuration required on the computers.
But nooooo...the guys who came around are contracted computer experts who need to ensure everything takes as long as possible. They need to look as though they're doing something big and complicated. Here's what they did...
...which has me stunned. All the existing cabling has been ripped out and I can only assume they've taken that away for themselves. Our old HUB is now defunct. The new broadband router has been positioned where I would have put it but these cowboys have run huge new lengths of cable around the office, which is just laying loose on the floor and looks a real mess. The router is designed to cater for more computers than the office will ever have, so has cost more than necessary.
Obviously not wanting to disappoint me, they made even more of a joke of themselves when it came to the computers themselves. All they did was to open up the LAN connection TCP/IP protocol settings dialogue and ticked the "obtain addresses automatically" button. And I mean, that's all they did. None of the computers where patched up to have all the latest security updates, despite the router having a hardware firewall, no consideration was put into perhaps checking the software firewalls were set up, hell, even turned on. Better safe than sorry?
Having let the computers randomly assign themselves IP addresses and work out for themselves what other settings to use has lead to trouble already. We have a photocopier that has a network scanning and printing card installed. This has to use a fixed IP address. Surprise surprise, one of the computers decided to assign itself the same IP as this device and knocked it off the LAN. Clever.
Oh and they didn't reconfigure the SMTP addresses in our email software so we could send mail out on the new connection.
Where does this leave me?
I'm amazed a group of monkeys got this far. I mean hey, it works but they're far from finishing the job. The office now contracts these guys to deal with our computer maintenance so really, I shouldn't be doing anything about the mess they made of what should have been a quick, simple, no fuss job. Obviously nothing changed as far as the office is concerned. I was up and down like a jack-in-the-box, at one point eight times in half an hour, to answer silly little questions. I had to reconfigure the SMTP addresses myself because it wasn't long before people started complaining that emails weren't being sent. It's by no means difficult, just that our new contracted computer 'experts' should have done this. In any case, shouldn't the office be calling them up for all their little questions?
Should I be upset that after over ten years, I've been replaced by a bunch of paid monkeys that aren't any good at their jobs? Madness...
posted by Matthew E Cornish at
14:01
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home